William Blake saw a world in a grain of sand, but it took Karl Ove Knausgård to uncover for us the vast galaxies of meaning in cornflakes and pickled herring. Behind the maddeningly meticulous transcription of everyday phenomena in his improbably popular 3,600-page novel series My Struggle lies, to my mind, a latent faith – the faith of a mystic – that everything, however seemingly mundane, has a secret waiting to be unveiled.
That mystical strain is much more explicit in the novels published either side of My Struggle. In A Time to Every Purpose under Heaven (2008), Knausgård had written about a man obsessed with meeting angels, while 2020’s The Morning Star riffs on the devil. In that novel, which inaugurated a new series, supernatural occurrences spook the populace after an unidentified celestial body appears over Norway, the “Morning Star” of the title, known as “Lucifer” in Latin. Should there be any doubt about its diabolical inspiration, the book is 666 pages long and the accompanying bibliography, published online, includes numerous titles on satanism.
